[Nate.]

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...the shorthanded postflop situations. This is basically the only skill set that's unique to LHE.*

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Could you expand on this, please? Are you referring to limit hold em as opposed to other formats of hold em, or as opposed to other forms of limit poker? (Or both?)

Do you mean broad strategic concepts or specific tactical situations?

Thanks,

Mack

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Mack--

No problem. And let me preface all of this by saying both that it's possibly controversial and that it's largely matters of degree.

What I think is that tough postflop hold'em situations in multiway pots are not that unlike tough situations in Stud. For stud you need some different skills: you need to analyze upcards, you need some basic combinatorics, you need to know hand ranges. If you can do it in stud you can do it in hold'em, and even multiway pots in razz aren't all that different.

In theory the same thing should apply to heads-up situations on the flop: you're just enumerating stuff and accounting for tendencies and acting accordingly. But on a practical level the skill set is pretty unique. Like when you have bottom pair and you're using some sort of counting technique to figure out your equity: the whole real-time estimation of the prior possibilities of playing paired vs. unpaired hands, and then discounting pocket pairs for Bayesian reasons, etc. etc. Mostly I think it's because you're using so many conditional probabilities for things that aren't ~completely~ independent (whereas in stud, often a guy will play Q(Qx) no matter what and you just have to straight quantify over all possible x's). Which (again, totally in a quantitative and not qualitative way) is weird when it's heads-up to the flop and both guys probably missed. There's really not much like it in poker. In stud you're always counting but both guys usually have something like a pair. (Actually the closest thing to this in stud is on late streets, in situations when guys are more likely to have folded if they hadn't picked up some sort of draw, so you have to start weighting the side-card ranges, and also there are more cards that aren't one of their likely pair cards [if they're likely to have started with a pair] to create the number of variables you face on a flop in hold'em.

So I guess what I'm talking about the process of enumerating when you're considering a handful of cards out of wide ranges that are interdependent somewhat more than they are in totally uniform distributions. I realize that this hasn't been totally clear, and I apologize for that. Mostly I'm just trying to put in mathematical language a set of feelings that I experience as a player. It's the middle ground where you have to rely on a ton of combinatorics but remember to adjust moderately for conditional stuff. Sort of the way a football team might be used to perfectly clear weather, and also have prepared for extremely foul weather, but not know what to do when things are just a little soggy.

--Nate